BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – It’s being called the Pope Francis Effect.
And one of the strongest features of the effect being created by the new pope, who has spent most of his life in this dynamic and sophisticated city, is his willingness to sit down and talk with almost anyone, including opponents.
The Pope has done so even when it’s not easy in this rivalrous country. “Argentinians love to argue,” said a tour guide in ... Read More …

Paul Russell is starting to feel extremely responsible after receiving a huge grant to research moral responsibility.
The University of B.C. philosophy professor will devote much of the next decade to fulfilling the expectations associated with an 80-million-kronor grant from the Swedish Research Council, worth $12 million.
In contrast to many Canadian politicians, Russell says, the Swedish government places high value on the humanities, specifically ethics. It believes rational minds are needed to work out ... Read More …

The message of the acclaimed TV series True Detective is “everything is a lie, including religion, marriage, order and civility,” says a reviewer.
Homeland is “a searing exploration of moral decay.” Mad Men is “drenched in narcissism and self-indulgence.” And the director of The Affair says viewers “hate” both main characters.
What is happening in popular North American fiction? Much of it is filled with darkness, despair, superficial sex, cynicism, anger, nihilism and paranoia.
While ... Read More …

UBC philosophy professor Paul Russell has won a humanities grant from the Swedish government worth about $12 million Cdn.
The specialist in moral reasoning and Scottish philosopher David Hume will work with the giant grant over a 10-year period while going back and forth between UBC and the University of Gothenberg.
Russell is rightly impressed that the Swedish government, unlike those in B.C. and many across Canada, still value the humanities to the extent they ... Read More …

The new pope, Francis, believes too many Catholics are “obsessed” with homosexuality, abortion, divorce and contraception.
Given the pope hopes to attain a “new balance,” he has rushed to set up an “extraordinary synod” so Catholics can air their opinions and frustrations about these divisive sex-related issues.
Pope Francis’s extraordinary synod, only the third in half a century, has been reverberating through the Vancouver archdiocese as scores of Catholics sent in their heartfelt responses to ... Read More …

In January, Angus Reid Public Opinion conducted a three-country survey aimed at figuring out how people in the United States, Canada and Britain felt about specific issues. The idea was not to look at these contentious topics through the lens of legality, but rather see whether respondents would regard them as “morally acceptable” or “morally wrong.”
Out of the 21 issues that were tested in the survey, people in the United States were less ... Read More …

My uncle and aunt seemed kind of frosty toward Christmas.
George and Janet Fox didn’t have children. They were atheists. And due to their own chilly upbringings, they tended to poke fun at feelings they deemed sentimental.
Even though uncle George and aunt Janet were liked by friends and family in British Columbia, they regularly disappeared at Christmas, heading to California to be alone over the holidays.
So, after they died, I had a bit ... Read More …

Sviatoslav Shevchuk first visited Vancouver 15 years ago as a fresh young priest on an adventure, driving here with friends from San Francisco.
This week he makes a return visit as His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, revered patriarch of the world’s four million Ukrainian Catholics.
“I remember admiring the fireworks,” the patriarch said of an evening he spent on English Bay in the summer of 1997.
On Saturday, he is to lead a morning service and ... Read More …

Ironically, even though higher education has supposedly become a more tolerant place in the name of secularism, a lot of moralizing still goes on there.
The author of The Decline of the Secular University, C. John Sommerville, says there is no shortage of fashionable moralizing occurring in academia.
I like the distinction Sommerville makes between being moral and moralizing; a point that I did not have room to fit into my Saturday essay headlined: ... Read More …

Moral values endure despite our differencesVancouver Sun ARCHIVESSat Apr 1 1995Byline: DOUGLAS TODD
The world is going to hell.Agree?Disagree?Don’t know?Rushworth Kidder shed light on this eternal question when he led 40 B.C. business people, educators, ecologists, health officials and others through some illuminating discussions about ethics.The bow-tied author of How Good People Make Tough Choices (Morrow) tested the moral barometer of our era at a recent two-day ... Read More …

We all have IQs. Or Intelligence Quotients. IQs measure human’s ability to reason with language, numbers and spatial relations.
We also have EQs. Or Emotional Intelligence Quotients. Made famous by brain psychologist Daniel Goleman, they describe humans’ skill handling emotions.
We also have what could be called MQs, or Moral Intelligence Quotients. Researcher Lawrence Kohlberg has been among those measuring humans’ capacity for empathy and ethical reasoning.
We also, I would suggest, have SQs, or ... Read More …